Adrian drifted downward, descending from the artificial sky toward the central plaza of the Inner Continent.
The sprawling execution ground, which had recently been the stage for a clash of sovereigns, was now a graveyard of the unconscious. The golden light unleashed by Androxus had indiscriminately crushed the minds of everyone present. King Elyras, Mariska, Xeolze, and the Elyrian guards lay sprawled across the ruined stone pavement. Not far from them were the remaining Astral Stage elders of the Ethereal Providence Sect, equally paralyzed by the overwhelming mental suppression.
Adrian's boots touched the cracked stone without a sound. His gaze swept over the devastation, finally settling upon the battered form of Tenyz.
The young master of the Ethereal Providence Sect lay crumpled amidst the debris. His robes were shredded and soaked in a mixture of his own blood. Adrian looked down at the deep lacerations carving across Tenyz's arms and shoulders, the unmistakable handiwork of Mariska's attacks. Despite his arrogance, he had been brought to his knees by the very "livestock" he had tormented for a long time.
Before making his next move, Adrian closed his eyes and expanded his source domain. He needed to be certain that there were no more hidden threats lurking in the shadows. The domain washed over the millions of unconscious wanderers and merchants in the Outer Commercial Continents, sweeping through the shattered architecture of the Hub.
His eyes narrowed slightly. Far away, in one of the Outer Commercial Continents, his perception brushed against two distinct minds that had not been entirely extinguished. They were flickering, incredibly weak, and on the brink of collapse, but they were conscious.
"They managed to shield themselves," Adrian noted, recognizing the faint, overlapping structure of a layered Willforce Wall protecting their minds. It was an impressive feat of survival, likely the work of highly trained operatives or elite intelligence gatherers. However, sensing no hostile intent or immediate danger emanating from their distant, paralyzed state, Adrian dismissed them from his focus. They were barely clinging to consciousness; they were in no position to intervene.
Sensing no other problems within the immediate vicinity, Adrian extended his right hand toward the unconscious Tenyz.
Back in the Virelith Galaxy, when Adrian had dismantled Morka's tyrannical rule, he had learned a crucial mechanic of his power. He had discovered that by devouring an enemy's entire physical body, rather than just extracting their Core, he could absorb their memories. It had been the key to understanding Morka's slave network and the broader politics of the Zephyrian Galaxy.
Following that logic, Adrian's original plan upon returning the Providence Hub had been to devour Navira entirely. Absorbing the physical body and mind of a Lesser Major Sect Leader would have granted him access to many things.
But there were unpredictable variables that had forced Adrian to abandon that plan.
First, Morka had merely been a Rule Stage cultivator. He possessed an ordinary mind, lacking the structural anchor of consciousness. Navira, however, had reached the Anchor stage. More importantly, she possessed that mysterious golden dot of energy within her mind, the very same anchor that currently stabilized Adrian's own ocean of willforce.
Adrian had possessed no idea what kind of mental backlash or struggle he would undergo if he attempted to forcibly consume an Anchor-stage mind anchored by a golden dot. Engaging in a internal war of consciousness to digest Navira's memories would have been incredibly dangerous.
Especially, Adrian couldn't risk testing this theory when he had constantly sensed the hidden, dangerous presence of someone lurking within the central golden spire. Initiating a potentially paralyzing internal struggle while someone waited in the shadows to strike his blind spot would have been outright suicide. So, he had been forced to let go of Navira, plucking only her Astral Core while leaving her physical body and memories to fall to the plaza floor. Her consciousness had already dissipated into the void long ago.
But now, with that unknown alien having fled and the immediate threats neutralized, the situation had changed. For now, his best bet to learn more information about this Hub, the ancient will that had just descended, and the overarching political landscape was Tenyz.
"Devour," Adrian whispered into the silence of the plaza.
Dark, crimson tendrils erupted from the palm of his hand. They shot forward like a nest of starving vipers, wrapping around the unconscious body of Tenyz. Tenyz's entire existence: his flesh, his bones, his blood, his Astral Core, and his underlying bodily structure was aggressively consumed by the dark crimson essence.
It was at that exact moment Adrian felt it.
Deep within the swirling vortex of the Devour concept, the golden dot within Tenyz's mind awakened. Even though Tenyz's physical body was paralyzed and dying, his consciousness instinctively fought back. A concentrated pulse of intent flared within the crimson tendrils, thrashing wildly to resist assimilation.
Instantly, the golden dot anchored deep within Adrian's own mind responded. It released a dominant pulse of its own, sending a tidal wave of Anchor-stage willforce crashing down upon the struggling fragment. Adrian felt as if his consciousness and Tenyz's consciousness were suddenly locked in a vicious war.
But Tenyz had only reached the Chime of Consciousness. His mind, though awakened, lacked the density of Adrian's. Against the sheer, crushing weight of an Anchor-stage mind, the struggle lasted mere seconds. The golden dot within Tenyz's mind flickered erratically, overwhelmed by Adrian's suppression, until it finally dimmed into nothingness.
Its resistance broken, the last remnants of Tenyz's mind and physical body were pulled entirely into Adrian.
Immediately, Adrian felt his willforce reserves expand slightly, the absorbed mental energy acting as a faint nourishment to his depleted state. But that minor benefit was instantly overshadowed by a catastrophic impact.
A vast flood of memories, chaotic fragments, and sensory data exploded into his brain.
Adrian stumbled, his boots scraping harshly against the stone pavement. He grabbed his head with both hands, a sharp hiss of pain escaping his lips. He was a being who had not even lived for a thousand years. Trying to forcibly process, categorize, and endure the memories of an alien who had lived for millions of years was an agonizing ordeal. The information was simply too vast, too dense, and it all crashed into him at the same time, threatening to drown his own sense of self beneath a tidal wave of foreign experiences.
He saw empires rising and falling, centuries spent in secluded cultivation, the intricate political maneuverings of the Providence Hub, and the countless faces of wandering cultivators Tenyz had manipulated or killed. Compared to this, absorbing Morka's memories had been like swallowing a single drop against an ocean.
Adrian clutched his mind, forcing his consciousness to act as a dam against the flood. He rapidly filtered through the chaotic noise, compartmentalizing the memories, discarding the useless centuries of mundane life, and extracting only what mattered to his current survival.
As he sifted through the timeline, he gazed upon the cruelties Tenyz had committed. He saw vivid, first-person memories of the subterranean holding blocks. He saw the Elyrians chained to massive runic arrays, their brilliant wings broken, their skin sliced open to drain the glowing crimson blood that fueled the Life-Blood Pills. He felt the cold, arrogant amusement Tenyz had experienced while brutalizing the silent Crown Prince for a millennium.
A sickening disgust aroused within him. The scale of the callous butchery made Adrian's stomach turn. The memory was vast, and he couldn't go through all of them to even discard the useless ones without feeling the phantom weight of millions of years of cruelty pressing down on his soul.
"Damn this bastard," Adrian cursed aloud, his voice rough with revulsion as he forcefully shoved the sadistic memories into the deepest, locked recesses of his mind.
It took several long minutes before the agonizing pressure in his skull began to subside. Adrian slowly lowered his hands, taking a deep breath until he could finally stand properly without the world spinning around him.
"It's good I didn't devour Navira back then..." Adrian muttered to the empty plaza, a cold sweat lingering on his brow. "...or else it would have made me completely vulnerable."
If devouring the memories of a Chime-stage cultivator with a few million-year lifespan had caused him to stumble and lose his focus for several minutes, attempting the same on Navira, an Anchor-stage sovereign with an even vaster history would have incapacitated him entirely. The hidden alien would have had all the time in the world to casually walk up and sever his head while his mind was tearing itself apart.
Adrian closed his eyes again, pulling forward the final, most crucial fragments he had extracted from Tenyz's recent past.
"Ancestor... Great Sect disciple... huh?" Adrian thought as the pieces of the cosmic puzzle finally snapped into place.
He saw the memory of the divination backlash. He saw the terror on Navira's face when the golden runic array had shattered, and the garbled, incomprehensible voice that had echoed from the void. He saw the transmission through the private UNI-OS account, the visage of Damian, and the revelation that the ancestor of the Ethereal Providence Sect was an elder within a Great Sect.
Adrian slowly opened his eyes as the dark crimson essence completely faded from his outstretched hand.
He now understood everything. He realized what kind of effect the Source had when others tried to divine his fate. When Navira had attempted to scry the blood she drew from him, the autonomous defense of the Source had presented an abyss so terrifying it had nearly destroyed her Astral Core. He also realized how others perceived his ability to effortlessly copy willforce techniques.
Back in the Andromeda supremacy war, Adrian had mirrored the authority techniques of the sect leaders on sight. But in the wider universe, that could theoretically be argued away as the result of a direct command. But copying a willforce technique, a structure built entirely within one's consciousness, had no arguable points like that. It defied the fundamental laws of reality, and it aroused suspicions.
And more importantly, the Great Sect disciple, Androxus, had witnessed all of it.
Androxus would know exactly what Adrian had done. He would soon inform his master, Damian, the ancient ancestor of the Yiphraen race. From what Adrian could connect from Tenyz's memories, Damian was an ancient monster who found out what was happening here in the hub before even Navira informed him.
Such a being could be very powerful. What followed this could be something that even Adrian couldn't handle. He had just personally felt how strong the will was when Androxus had unleashed his master's intent. If that golden light was merely a fraction of Damian's true willforce, Adrian was certain he couldn't do anything against the man himself. At least, not in his current state, and certainly not if Damian decided to descend upon him personally.
Adrian let out a slow exhale. "This has escalated much farther than I expected."
He had come to the Providence Hub looking for inspiration to forge a divine concept. In the span of days, he had accidentally triggered the paranoia of a Major Sect, annihilated their armies, and provoked the wrath of a Great Sect elder who now likely viewed him as a cosmic anomaly that needed to be eradicated or dissected.
Pushing the daunting political reality aside for the moment, Adrian turned his gaze toward the center of the plaza.
He looked at the unconscious form of the Elyrian Crown Prince, slumped against the shattered remains. As Adrian stared at the scarred, battered royal, he felt the same magnetic pull still appearing from him through the Concepts of Fate and Causality.
The concepts were still tethered to the prince. The reason he had been brought here had not yet been fulfilled.
A faint, confident smile broke through the lingering tension on Adrian's face.
"I have what I came for," Adrian thought as white-grey light glowed softly within his eyes beneath the dim artificial sky. "There is no reason for me to remain concerned with this Hub or anything connected to it."
With that, Adrian started to move. He raised his hands, a gentle wave of Source essence flowing outward to carefully wrap around the unconscious forms of King Elyras, Mariska, Xeolze, the elite guards, and the Crown Prince. He had secured the Elyrian civilization's future, plundered the memories he needed, and secured the target Fate had chosen for him. It was time to return.